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Copilots Everywhere: Thomas Dohmke and Eugene Yan
Takeaway
GitHub's bet is human-centric copilots that bridge issue-to-PR while keeping the developer in flow — augmentation, not autonomous replacement.
Summary
- GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke recounts Copilot's 2020 origin built remotely on Codex; internal staff-ship NPS of ~72-73 was unprecedented and AI wrote ~25% of code in enabled files, now ~50%, higher in Java.
- Framing: not 'building an AI engineer' but 'AI for engineers' — meeting developers where they are, inline ghost-text autocompletion was a way around hallucinations.
- Workspace bridges from GitHub issue → spec → plan → diff → PR, keeping humans editable at every step; benefits non-developers too by translating user stories to code-change views.
- Treats stack-overflow-style hallucinations and Copilot hallucinations as analogous — both wrong but accelerate flow.
copilotcode-generationgithub
Original description
Join GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke for the closing keynote with a deep dive on Copilot Workspace, and what’s ahead as he talks on AI’s coming agentic wave. Recorded live in San Francisco at the AI Engineer World's Fair. See the full schedule of talks at https://www.ai.engineer/worldsfair/2024/schedule & join us at the AI Engineer World's Fair in 2025! Get your tickets today at https://ai.engineer/2025 About Thomas Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools developers love and accelerating innovations that are changing software development. Currently, Thomas is Chief Executive Officer of GitHub, where he has overseen the launch of the world's first at-scale AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot. Before his time at GitHub, Thomas previously co-founded HockeyApp and led the company as CEO through its acquisition by Microsoft in 2014, and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK. About Eugene I build ML systems to serve customers at scale, and write to learn and teach.